Note:This was going to be short pieces about things I missed during a week of illness. It turned into a Very Long Piece riffing on two posts from Capital Gains and Games. And that’s without even mentioning the bravura work Stan Collender is doing there: see, for instance, this note that a deficit reduction bill […]
Yes, it’s another “AB was right” post. Detractors of this blog in general and me in particular could stop reading now. But they shouldn’t. Anyone who thought through the economics could have pointed out what I did on the 17th: From [Republican Congressman John] Boehner’s site: At least 30 percent of employers would gain economically […]
Brad DeLong, not generally a Leading Indicator in such matters, follows Mark Thoma yesterday in looking into the abyss and seeing the outline of a train around the “light”: Henceforth, I will call the current unpleasantness not “The Great Recession,” but rather “The Little Depression.” This still strikes me as optimism, but I’m stil on […]
by Mike Kimel I recently got an e-mail from a fellow blogger asking me to link a list that blogger made of “top X” economics blogs. (And no, I will not link to the list or identify that blogger.) My response: Hi. Umm…. I looked over your list, and while there are some very good […]
One of my favorite paper presentations ever was by Daniel Parent, who is a good enough reason in himself for pending Labor Economists to apply to HEC. He was trying to present data on income inequalities in the Financial Services industry and was forced to note—all right, I asked—that they didn’t have the data to […]
Economists’s claims that taxes should not be paid by corporations is based on the premise that government should be relatively inefficient and/or run a deficit in perpetuity. Discuss.
It’s no secret I’m not a fan of the birth-death adjustment to the employment serieses: not from a necessary belief that they’re biased, but rather because they give the lie to the illusion of accurate monthly data. But imagine for the moment that there had been no adjustment before the January data release. The headline […]
I’m in Kansas City, where the Royals have started the season as one would expect of the current iteration of the team. Fortunately, I’m not here for the baseball, but rather for the Kauffman Economics Bloggers Forum. There will be presentations tomorrow (agenda here; homepage for live streaming here) in three session. The morning features […]
by Mike Kimel Is Economics a Science – Three Comments In the last few days I came across three very different posts, each of which covers (to some extent) the question of whether economics is a science. In order of how focused on the posts are on that particular question…. Barry Ritholtz is on fire […]
Mark Thoma begins with a hilarious typo, but eventually gets to the Quote of the Decade (if not century) from Alan Blinder: If we economists stubbornly insist on chanting ‘free trade is good for you’ to people who know that it is not, we will quickly become irrelevant to the public debate. As Rusty can […]